The Business
Sandler Training is the world’s largest professional development and training organization. They specialize in sales, management, and leadership.
Sandler offers so much more than just training. They help with interview processes, defining search models, and optimizing sales structures. They offer assessments, podcasts, blogs, webinars, and much more.
The Challenge
Jared Lockwood needed to be reaching out to new prospects, but knew he would not be able to sustain cold calling. Cold calling was all the rage when Jared started in sales over 13 years ago, but ever since technology and social media advanced, he has found that fewer people pick up the phone. And when they do, the process of deciding whether they are a good prospect takes a long time. Cold calling is draining and takes what feels like forever to have an effective turnover rate.
Sandler believes, and Jared condones, that for every 100 calls, you’re lucky if 6 people go to the next steps. So they needed to leverage other ways of outreach.
Jared knew LinkedIn was the hot place to be but did not have the time, energy, nor expertise to approach people on the platform in a productive way.
But “productive” can be defined in a few different ways. After Jared’s years in the sales space, his definition is to build good relationships to grow his business over time. But to get that started, he knew he needed help. So when he found HyperSocial, he was ready to get the ball rolling.
The HyperSocial Solution
Jared came to HyperSocial prepared to run a successful campaign and excited to watch it grow, evolve, and nurture it all the while.
We crafted a profile optimization for his personal LinkedIn page, wrote messaging to send to his target audience, and built his target audience with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
For his automated messaging campaign, we took a hyper-personalized and pre-qualifying approach. The first message asks for their input on a class that Jared teaches. If they have any input, that starts a conversation. If not, they weed themselves out.
The hyper-personalized aspect included a photo of Jared holding a coffee cup. The first name of whoever is receiving the messages is automated onto it as if he picked it up from a coffee shop for them. This unique touch catches the eye and directly targets prospects who may have not seen prior messages.
HyperSocial essentially took on the role of “cold calling” for Jared. LinkedIn outreach may not be the traditional cold call, but it is more time-efficient and up to date considering so many people don’t pick up the phone nowadays.
This approach is saving Jared hours on hours of prospecting so he can just talk with people who are interested. After that, it’s all about having meaningful engagements and triaging those to decide who of this batch is a good fit. The wider net you cast, the more prospects you pull in.
The HyperSocial Results
Jared started with HyperSocial in early December, and despite the holidays and the general lull sales often go through during that time of year, Jared closed a client in his first few months working with us that covered our costs for a whole year and then some! Everything else he has and will close is now profit!
And he couldn’t have closed that deal without HyperSocial’s outreach. The prospect had heard about Sandler but had never gone the extra mile to research more in-depth. When Jared reached out directly to the prospect through our humanized automation, it was a no-brainer.
Jared’s campaign is buzzing. With our outreach, in 3 months, his network has grown by 1000+ people, meaning Jared’s LinkedIn connections have skyrocketed 233%.
That means he has grown his second-degree network as well as his first degree. His posts will be more visible, and more people will be interested in having those conversations.
Jared has had hundreds of meaningful conversations and met tons of new people through our outreach. And conversations are the key to closing deals.
In 3 months, HyperSocial has started over 260+ conversations.
People like to buy from people, not businesses. So those conversations have been the driving force of Jared’s campaign. He’s got a ton of people in the pipeline, and calls scheduled left and right.
Don’t take our word for it, here’s what Jared had to say about HyperSocial:
How do you feel about HyperSocial and where you currently are on your campaign path?
“What HyperSocial does is an art, it’s a science, it’s a time management tool, it’s a differentiator, and it provides a return based on conversations to close the outcomes.
So for me, it’s a no-brainer.
One of the unintentional outcomes of my campaign with HyperSocial is connecting with centers of influence or businesses that complement what we do and it ends up we actually can help clients together. So we’ve been calling those ‘center of influence conversations.’”
Any specific thoughts on your experience with HyperSocial?
“Where HyperSocial moves the needle is in its ability to maximize your time in connecting with people, engaging them in intelligent conversations, qualifying the right people into a meaningful conversation that they’re comfortable having, and allowing others to self-select out.
So you’re only spending time with the people who want to have a conversation with you. I personally believe that content creates credibility, and conversations create opportunities. How do we get people comfortable having a conversation with us? Because without that, nothing really meaningful happens from a business development standpoint.
So we figured out how to accurately and appropriately represent me, my style, and my brand through my messaging, while also creating a series of touches to allow people to be comfortable connecting with me.”